Everything changed in an instant.
In 2022, fresh off a marriage and a honeymoon, I was on my way to meet the head of IT at a company we were acquiring. I was being handed the leadership role that would solidify my career path. I never made the meeting.
A motorcycle accident cost me my left leg below the knee. The plan I had went out the window that day. The planning didn't.
"Plans are worthless, but planning is everything." — Dwight D. Eisenhower
Before
The Fat Boy.
Weekends were hill country roads and whoever could get away that morning.
After
Standing up, then walking.
It went in that order, and it took a while. A gait belt and two nurses first. Parallel bars and a prosthetist later.
Rather than let it consume me, I stayed positive and kept going. I took work meetings. I saw family and friends. I pushed to live my life as if I had no limitations, because the alternative was letting the accident decide who I was going to be.
The shirt in that last one reads "Embrace the Suck." It was accurate.
Back to it
Same job. Different leg.
I went back to running enterprise technology. The work didn't get easier and nobody lowered the bar, which is exactly what I wanted. These are from industry summits after the wreck — the kind of rooms I was in before it, doing the kind of work I did before it.
The one on the right is Aron Ralston at the Midsize Enterprise Summit — the climber who cut off his own arm to get out from under a boulder. Two amputees comparing hardware in a conference hall. Not a bad afternoon.
That Eisenhower line isn't a poster quote for me. The plan I had was gone in a second. What was left was the habit of planning: break it down, write the steps, do the next one, and change the plan the moment reality tells you to. That's the same thing I do with a $12M budget, and the same thing I do with an engine on a stand.
I never let the accident tear me down. I'd rather show what's possible when you put your mind to it.
With Aron Ralston, Midsize Enterprise Summit.
What replaced the riding
Two projects and a shop floor.
The riding weekends were gone, so I needed something to put them into. I dove into rebuilding my dad's 1995 C1500 — the truck he bought new while he was stationed in Okinawa, Japan. It's the one vehicle in the garage that was never really a project car; it's a family truck that happens to need work.
That catapulted into buying a 1971 Nova and finally chasing the muscle car I'd wanted since I was a kid. Between the two of them, the weekends filled right back up.
